How to build a Race Car

Zach wanted a Roary the Racing Car cake for his 5th birthday.  I searched the internet for ideas and saw one that referenced a book with a design.  So after a trip to Borders for the book and the grocery store for supplies, I started my work.....

The book recommended a Medeira cake and had a recipe, so I decided to try it.  This was a misktake.  I don't know what I did wrong (and I consider myself to be a decent baker) - but it did not turn out good at all.

The cake was dry and crumbly and didn't have a very good chocolate taste.  So instead of being ready to decorate at 830pm, I had to start over with a new cake.  But this time I used a tried and true recipe from a Cooking Light book - but used real butter and eggs instead of the "light" ingredients.

This was also my first attempt at "sugarpaste" or "fondant" - I am still not sure of the difference.  But I made up a batch of this to use for Roary's accessories.  Zach originally asked for a frosting cake - so he didn't want me to cover the cake with the sugar paste as shown in the book.  And really I don't know that I like the taste of the sugar paste, so while it doesn't have the same smooth finish - I do love the taste of buttercream frosting.

As my cake was baking I was looking at the book and the Roary website to figure out exactly how to make the cake.  Here is the book's version:

But after actually looking at Roary, I realized he wasn't exactly like this.  So while the new cake was baking, I worked on the frosting and sugar paste.

After the cake cooled - I tried to get the shape right.  I also really tried to get true red frosting, but it seems no matter how much color you add, it doesn't turn red.  I even used a little burgundy color to try to make it darker too.

While I tried and tried to get the buttercream nice and smooth, it seemed the more I tried the worse it looked.  Plus since I had cut the cake to shape it, there were a lot of crumbs, so the crumbs kept coming off into the frosting.  Looks more like a plane at this point than a car. But after adding my sugar paste parts, it started to look like a car, or I should say more like Roary the Racing Car.   Somewhere I had seen someone use chocolate donuts as wheels (instead of black sugar paste).   I had made a checkered flag, but didn't really know what to do with it, so I added it on top.

 

So at midnight, my cake looked good, but my kitchen not so much.....

This morning I was excited to see Zach's reaction to his cake.  So I had him close his eyes and I showed it too him.   He was super excited and said it was the coolest cake.  Of course - he did notice I didn't put the number 1 on him.  I intentionally left this off - thinking I should put a "5" since it is his 5th birthday, but he insisted that Roary is #1, not #5.  So this morning we added the numbers.